Lutris – Open Gaming Platform

Linux has improved a lot its game support in recent years. Wine has a solid development and the official arrival of Steam has expanded the game catalog. Now we have Lutris, an open source platform that catalogs games from Linux, Windows (via Wine), emulated (ie. MAME), browser games or Steam.

Steam is available in major distros and stores like Good Old Games and the Humble Store offer a large number of titles for Linux. Steam can manage its own games , but what about the rest?

In their own words: Lutris is an open gaming platform for Linux. It helps you install and manage your games in a unified interface. Our goal is to support every game which runs on Linux, from native to Windows games (via Wine) to emulators and browser games. The desktop application and the website are libre software.

For these cases we have Lutris an open source platform that released its version 0.4.13. Lutris allows us to manage games regardless of their technical condition. Whether they are “native” titles, run with Wine or they are online games or ran through emulated consoles, Lutris can deal with them. In fact, the program includes more than 20 emulators that we can install with just a few clicks, and also has the ability to open games on Steam.

Lutris does not seem to intend to replace Steam but complements and expands its catalog. Some of the features that its developers have planned in Lutris are the complete support of GOG and Humble Bundle, general import of ROMs, management of saved games, a polished interface to configure gamepads, and social elements like lists of friends and internal chat. For Debian-Ubuntu it requires a manual configuration of the repositories but there is a .deb package available to download and install.